A Brief History of 'Crying Over Spilled Milk'

Like every other interest group in the land, food-crusaders went into last night's State of the Union address with a wish list. President Obama might have talked about what he's doing to modernize farm subsidies, fund healthy school lunches, or regulate the use of antibiotics in livestock. In the end, our nation's food-industrial system got just one mention from the president, and it was a joke about spilled milk. Around minute 38 (you can watch above — note the helpful graphic):

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"I've ordered every federal agency to eliminate rules that don't make sense... We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill — because milk was somehow classified as an oil. With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk."

It was a bad joke. Even Obama knew it was a bad joke — you can tell by that sheepish grin. It definitely wasn't as good as the salmon gag from a year ago.

But when did we start talking about "crying over spilled milk," anyway? A long time ago, actually. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the saying originated in a 17th-century British proverb about "weeping over shed milk." By 1738, the language had been modernized, with satirist Jonathan Swift writing, "'Tis folly to cry for spilt milk," in his treatise Polite Conversation. A less plausible but more fun origin story has it that the phrase came about as a federal propaganda slogan during the Great Depression to encourage farmers to destroy surplus milk in order to prop up its prices. Also, February 11 is Don't Cry Over Spilled Milk Day. You can't make this stuff up, folks.

Oh, and here's the real story behind that regulation Obama referenced, which sounds too ridiculous to possibly be true: The EPA has had a spill-prevention-and-control policy on the books since 1973, which, while intended for petroleum, also technically included milk and other liquid animal and vegetable fats. This absurd oversight was discovered a couple years ago, and Republicans proceeded to promptly make hay with it. The EPA gave the dairy industry every assurance that it wouldn't be enforced, but the exemption was only made official last year. So the supposed $10,000 savings to farmers is, as it turns out, entirely hypothetical.